


descendants of the sage

by terafonne (lexiconicality)



Category: Naruto
Genre: Body Dysphoria, Character Study, Child Soldiers, Gen, Not Canon Compliant, Trans Male Character, Warring Clans Era
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-08
Updated: 2017-11-18
Packaged: 2018-10-01 04:14:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10180439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lexiconicality/pseuds/terafonne
Summary: An extrapolation on Kishimoto's utter apathy towards female characters:a study of the uzumaki, uchiha, and senju clans where they each can trace their ancestry back to direct descendants of the sage, starting with the matriarchal uzumaki, going through the trials madara faced as a trans boy, and ending with a silly, hopeful, optimistic fool with big dreams.





	1. keepers of the soul

**Author's Note:**

> -i have no fucking clue what s going on in canon i quit around the time madara summoned a f u cking meteorite for fuc ks sake kishi what the heck.  
> -for the purposes of this story kaguya is asura and indras mom  
> -unfortunately i have derived a stunning majority of my knowledge on japanese mythology from puzzle and dragons :3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which the Uzumaki don't so much derail the train of canon as blow it up.

You know what? I bet Indra and Asura weren’t the only kids of the Sage. Kishimoto’s already shown a complete lack of characterization and development for his female characters, so screw canon.

I bet he had daughters, lots of them, hair fire-bright as their chakra, like their mother. (They tell stories about sage of the six paths, him and his two sons with strange new powers. They forget that legends or not, in the end they are only men, and cannot produce new life. That this strange new power they wield forth to the world would have no heirs without the wives, the mothers. But stories of friendship and love and hope and growth are not the stories people wish to hear when humanity seems so terribly small in the darkness of the night, and so they are not told. And so they forget. These are dark times, after all.)

They have no kekkai genkai inheritance but their longevity and absurdly large chakra capacities. Let the brothers battle it out, Sharingan and strength, Mokuton and heart. The Uzumaki will preserve knowledge, define their own brand of chakra to bind the gods themselves to their will. They will not bother to play median between two insane rivals. If they want to fight, let them. If they want to love, let them. If they want to forget the uzumaki, let them try.

Family is not carving footholds in the bright new souls each generation brings. Family is learning to let go, perhaps painfully and tearfully, because you choose the people you stand with, beacuse this life is too short to waste.

The first daughter, brash trailblazer that she is, will make chakra chains explode out of her back to ravage the brigands thinking that a caravan of girls is easy picking. The second daughter, given the time and protection to be scholarly, will create an art and a weapon all at once in the elegance of ink. Another daughter will categorize brushes and inks and papers and chakra, another daughter will document the petty squabbles and clan rivalries in basic but precise cryptography, another daughter will watch and learn the shifting tides of loyalty, and another daughter will laugh prettily at the men who think they can own her and slit their throats. Another daughter will prove the existence of shinigami and life after death, but the daughters of Kaguya have bow to no god, and so they will hammer out a contract with the representation of the abstract.

These are the ones who record chakra theory and affinity, postulating and experimenting and developing a metal to absorb, hold, and express chakra. (So many decades later, a young man with yellow-slitted eyes regrets few things, but he mourns the information lost in the fall of Uzushio.)

Not all in the clan wish to turn their hands to destruction. To choose the path of civilian is no scourge here; it is a path of growth and self-sustainment, a path tread lightly upon but welltrod, for the underlooked civilians are no less caring, driven, loved, brave, greedy, selfless, fearful, sentient. The Uzumaki clan travels from lush valleys to rice paddy villages to floating raft towns to mountain-pass chalets, leaving behind a trail of good fortune and wealth, better seeds of grain, new ways to live, better armor and weaponry. Where they wander civilization coalesces, turning scattered nomadic tribes into agricultural communes, turning communes into tradeposts into towns into cities into nations. (The life led by warriors is hardly sustainable. In the short term, perhaps, if you only wish to live past what is actively trying to kill you. But the clan, ever-moving, looks forward. Such is the standard set, that in the years to come even the strongest of shinobi, those deemed gods among men, would bow to the policies of civilian leaders.)

When the other set of descendants finally join forces, build themselves a haven and shelter out of a forest of their own making, the clan of the whirlpool keep moving on. But they’ve started something, with Konohagakure no Sato and it’s no longer safe for such a large group of nomadic shinobi (trained to kill and fight quickly if dishonorably because there are lives you have to place at a higher standard than others in this imperfect world, and they’ve picked up a few other clans here and there and number more than a hundred strong altogether). They choose to settle on an archipelago just off the coast of Nami, between Kiri and Konoha. They carve a home in the rocky shores scoured by saltwater and stinging wind, here, in these whirlpool-ridden waters between sea and sky, land and water, here they make Uzushiogakure.

They build their city of colors, brightly sunny, a setting sun perched on the edge of the world with elegant sweeps of ink fused with chakra, construct walls and foundations with chains of chakra. They forge an alliance with their errant distant relatives with a girl whose name means legend in an all-but-forgotten language and a man who builds. He dies young in war not long after his most precious person -- (the Uchiha and Senju, Mito thinks, both build their lives in another’s heart) -- but his wife lives on with the Kyuubi no Kitsune, raging and hating and barely able to parse human speech (not that he was willing to, anyways), in her belly and a granddaughter to raise. She lives on in an increasingly lonely Senju compound. She lives on when her home is shattered.

Like autumn leaves, some surviving straggling Uzumaki are blown into Konoha. One is a girl called Kushina, but far unlike her namesake, she is brash and loud, impossible to ignore. Like her namesake, she is breathtakingly beautiful, and even more loyal. Kushina is a wildfire walking into a forest and Mito walks to the Sandaime (less than four decades and the village is already on the third) with gray in her hair and liver spots showing her age but no less vitality in her body and tells him, Kushina would and could hold this burden, let me give her the knowledge that should be her birthrite, and in turn she will hold the Kyuubi for Konoha.

(Kushina would accept this burden, were she asked. She is not. Let us not soften the choices Uzumaki-Senju Mito made. She took in a grieving, lonely child, and made her a weapon. She gave a war orphan a sorely-needed family, and gave her the tools to survive in this world. These are both true.)

This is how Uzushio lives on, in the lives and minds of its descendants. In the perpetually wet land of Ame, two live who will bear a boy who will open eyes of violet. In the grasslands of Kusa there is a grandfather who teaches his nearsighted granddaughter how to fight. Across the fertile soil of Cha, a small band of merchants returns to their nomadic lifestyle. In the halls of the Fire Temple, a former jounin hangs up his weapons. In the civilian sector of Konoha, one red-haired genin grows up to have a child with pink. In the chaos of Kiri’s political regime, a former Uzu chuunin sells his body to a hunter-nin who will be executed for her heritage, but not before birthing and hiding an infant girl who will inherit a deadly combination of abilities.

This is how the Uzumaki maintain their clan, building the stepping stones to new eras, ever-moving, and looking forward.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -kushina reference: im pretty sure kishimoto was making a joke about the shinto god kushinadahime who kind of fits/creates the nadeshiko stereotype, that is, loyal, quiet, feminine, demure. it's not as sexist as my terribly brief summary here makes it sound, but it essentially characterizes the "perfect wife". which is not kushina obviously, except the loyal to family above all else part.  
> -uzumaki references: ame, parents of nagato. kusa, karin & grandpa. cha merchants, i dont remember lol. fire temple, sora? maybe? civ konoha, sakura's parents. kiri sex worker, mei terumi's dad.  
> -there's a thing people like to do in fix-it fics where the bijuu are treated as innocent slaves to human greed for power. i think it rose from how kishimoto never really intended the kyuubi to be a significant character in itself, existing more as a concept to fuel character development, but he ran out of power-ups to throw on naruto and so turned kyuubi a) sentient and b) friendly, in a tsundere way. i think of the bijuu more as some unholy combination of petty gods and natural disasters. maybe they're not actively massacring people, but if they step on someone, or create a lake in a crop field, or cause a tsunami, they're not particularly affected. and of course, their chakra is also deadly to civilians, and is shown to linger for a long time so that doesn't help public perception.


	2. guardians of knowledge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> falling in love is an act of defiance when you know how the story ends

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings: transmisogny, internalized transphobia, general sexism, trans character written by cis author, child soldiers, more explicit warnings in endnotes
> 
> a/n: i went to read the wiki just to factcheck. and I REGRET IT SO MUCH kishi what the fuck what the fuckity fuck nopenopenopenope so like. you know the Epilogue What Epilogue tag for hp, we need one for naruto.

Sometime between the birth of chakra utilization and the birth of one Uchiha Madara, the genetic map detailing the construction of the Hyuuga clan's vaunted Byakugan veers wildly off-course. Some say it is overexposure to demonic chakra, that this is proof of mythical, multi-tailed monsters. Some say it is too much inbreeding. The Uchiha themselves, once formalized as a clan, call it a gift from Kami.

 

To this day, the Hyuuga call it a deal made with a devil. (Left unsaid and largely forgotten is that the Hyuuga made the deal, shunted Indra's vengeful burden, cut out the festering roots of his influence. They had their own rot, of course, but this is not that story.)

 

And so Madara is born with dark eyes and darker hair. There isn't much difference, between siblings, in the early years. Children of the clans have no room for innocence. If you can't fight you're dead, and Madara refuses to drag down the clan. It as much a matter of pride as it is of duty.

 

But the Uchiha have another defining character trait: they are possessive to a fault. And meeting with Hashirama, spending the days training and skipping stones; these are precious moments. The softness of the days wells up within Madara, filling up the cracks of an unstable, wartorn society. It is a home he did not know he needed, a place of trust without judgement, a place where he has a peer.

 

It doesn't last.

 

In the moment of the clash, the old spark of resentment on being passed over as heir flares again. He viciously redirects the sentiment towards the Senju because Izuna is family, Izuna is his baby brother, and for some arbitrary reason Izuna is allowed a freedom Madara can't quite express.

 

\--

 

_ did he touch you. _

 

_ you are fortunate you have yet to start bleeding, girl. _

 

_ learn your place. _

 

_ do you think he loved you because you whored yourself. _

 

_ insolence. _

 

_ you cannot be trusted. _

 

_ you will have guards. _

 

\--

 

Madara keeps his eyes shut, sharingan whirling away underneath the lids. He is the picture of complacency. Perfectly precise chakra sears away the hot tears boiling up. He bites his tongue. He'd shout, but he knows they wouldn't understand, doesn't know how to make them understand. He just knows that they are wrong. He would never have let Hashirama put a child in him. He promises himself. Never and no one. (He has walked this earth less than a decade, but his innocence has long since been burned out of him.)

 

He redeems himself, as much as he can. Not a shadow of his shame will taint Izuna's legacy. He wreaks devastation on the battlefield, grows up trailing massacres behind him. He hears the whispers, too, _that_ _ feral girl ,  unwed ,  doesn't know her place _ , and fainter but there all the same,  _ spends too much damn time with the heir, corrupting her own brother, shameless hedonist _ .

 

The sources of those whispers are cowards who serve best as fodder for the front-lines and baiting enemies into traps. Madara does so love efficiency.

 

Between him and Izuna they are building the clan to ever greater heights. (At times he remembers the dream he had shared with Hashirama. At times he remembers that he is a teenager and yet more than halfway past his expected lifespan. At times he remembers when children represented hope rather than an acceptable number of casualties.) He believes in the glory they can create.

 

It doesn't last.

 

He is eighteen when Izuna is killed. He does not have the support of the clan. He tries anyway, riding on the hope of his newly awakened Mangekyo. But he forgets, the Eyes of Misery were born to kill hope. He is wounded badly, delirious with fever. In one fell swoop, the clan cuts their losses, obtains peace, gains a political advantage.

 

He is married to his brother's killer.

 

\--

 

Tobirama is highly intelligent, albeit generally better at applying his genius towards his research rather than people, but he knows that this sham of a marriage is something neither of them want. He knows that Madara is angry, lost, and grieving. She is humiliated and politically powerless, treated as a war trophy by her own clan. He harbors no misperceptions of their comparative strength; she is a monstrous powerhouse on par with Hashirama, he is a precise tactical genius who generally outmaneuvers opponents. She is compliant only because they have to present a united front; Hashirama's dream is fragile as soap bubbles and Madara is rational enough to accept that in the long run this is the better option. The option Izuna would have wanted. But in their private life, Madara harasses Tobirama without remorse. She foments annoyance at Hashirama's boundless idealism, gives Tobirama reasons to distrust Uchiha, never offers comfort or relief in Tobirama's weariest hours. She smirks, triumphant, when Tobirama snaps back, just as resentful and snarky. It is frustrating beyond belief, and Tobirama jabs viciously at sore wounds. (On some level he is disturbed to recognize that the lack of reaction to his retaliatory words is well-practiced.)

 

There are times Tobirama is exhausted of their bickering, wants to hit her. Just to shut up the fountain of vitriol for a few moments of peace. He restrains himself; there is a noticeable unbalance of power. He had a choice in this union. Perhaps if she had been asked, she would have agreed, but she hadn't. He doesn't touch her. He doesn't rise to the bait. He is beginning to learn her tells, to see how she had loved and resented Izuna. He tells her the truth, as always, that he did not want these shackles, that war is a terrible monster, that perhaps she could finally build the dream with Hashirama. He thinks she is finally beginning to listen.

 

It doesn't last.

 

Months of a marriage without children, without heirs. The people talk.

 

He brings it up one night. He would never force himself, of course. But public opinion demands an answer. In her eyes, Tobirama sees something flicker and die. He waits.

 

\--

 

In another life, if Madara had trusted someone with his secret, perhaps he would have been willing to explain the promise he made to himself and the reason behind it to Tobirama. But here and now, he could barely trust the Senju not to kill him in his sleep, much less with a nebulous idea of his sense of self. Even thinking it to himself, it sounded like nothing so much as a paper thin excuse to violate the alliance. (If Madara had better emotional perception. If he had not been surrounded by mistrust and derision from birth. If he had not been a child soldier. If he had not had the single bond he formed of his own volition torn out. If.)

 

Madara swallows. Nods. Murmurs his need to prepare.

 

Finds a mirror. Looks at himself, pale skin overlaid with paler scars, the wild riot of his hair spilling over his broad (unseemly) shoulders, the tight cords of muscle he worked so hard to gain, the faint swell of fat dripping over his pectorals, the slight flare of his hips despite the herbs he took once a month, when the bleeding first started, that same bright crimson now spilling across his iris. The tomoe of his Mangekyo begin spinning.

 

\--

 

_ you are a woman. you want children. you are a woman. you want to please your husband. you are a woman. you want your belly to swell, ripe for plucking. yOU aRe A wOmAN. _

 

\--

 

This is how time passes, dreamlike:

 

A few months in, and Madara approaches Mito. Her laugh is joyful, delighted, and from there, the news spreads to clan matriarchs to clan heads to merchants to civilians. Hashirama, grateful as ever for new life, is quick to offer clan tailors for alterations and less restrictive clothing, arranges feasts to celebrate, helps Tobirama acquire the choicest fruits.

 

A few months more, the swelling is noticeable. Madara sulks, ignores the thrum of instinctive disgust, and takes it out on Tobirama by forcing him to rub her aching feet.

 

The delivery is both better and worse than expected; Madara takes strength from Tobirama's steady presence in the midst of the flurry of midwives and grandmothers. At the sympathetic tightening of his eyes, Madara tries to joke, "It is not so bad as being burned." The joke falls flat as the bleeding begins. Little Kojirou comes out a squalling sticky mess, but the flow of blood has yet to slow, so Madara drinks the tea provided and falls into darkness. When she wakes, they tell her she is barren. Tobirama says he is fine with this, that one is enough. Madara can only nod, throat tight with conflicting desires.

 

They live softly, quietly, as though they can escape the looming shadow of war, if they can be small enough. It helps that Kojirou is a quiet baby, dark red eyes tracking his parents early on. Madara finds that love wells up easily if she thinks of him as "child of mine", overwhelming the initial disgust against "a life I carried within myself". Sometimes the thought occurs, that Izuna would have loved being an uncle, and Madara has to choke down the grief.

 

It doesn't last. In the end, it is not the war. The number of border skirmishes have let off as winter sets in, and even though the Land of Fire is aptly named, Konoha will gladly take this reprieve. Tobirama is not home any more often, spending his newly-freed time on logistics and strategies and consolidating the information Mito collects from her contacts to predict how the other nations are preparing for spring. When he is home, he does not know how to talk to Madara. They have spent so long as enemies that they can predict each other's character, but there is no bond. It is only through their son that they behave as the married couple they should be.

 

And then the sickness comes. It starts with fussing, refusal to eat, vomiting what he does swallow. Kojirou cries through the night, leaving them both stressed and anxious. The herbs the healers provide cannot do their work if he cannot keep them down. He sheds weight that infants cannot afford to lose, shivers even when they swaddle him in layers and hold him with fire chakra. They bring him to the hospital Hashirama is starting to build, still small. The medic-nin say that he is losing his chakra coils, that he does not know why, has never heard of such a thing. It is as though his soul cannot stay in his body. The medic provides a chakra transfusion, but it is only a stopgap. Over the course of a month, they watch him wither. 

 

Senju Kojirou dies at three months and sixteen days. 

 

The dream is a nightmare. Uchiha Madara wakes.

 

\--

 

If Madara were coherent, his reasoning might follow along these lines: that the genjutsu he cast was not strong enough. He is not strong enough. He hunts for power.

 

You know how this ends.

 

To chain a god, morph an immortal being into a monster of destruction, yes these things can be done. But they ought not be. He loses himself, doing such a thing. His eyes are divine but his mind and chakra are not.

 

Guilt and grief and anger gnawing in his heart, and all he knows is that others should hurt as he hurts. They are gnats, buzzing at him with open mouths, incomprehensible. He screams back, feral. Didn't they call him feral once? They did not know the meaning then. The one who feels like new life comes forward, jabbering like the others. He snarls, vicious, showing the blood on his teeth. (He does not know why there is blood on his teeth.) The one who feels like new life responds with wood, intending to bind him. Yes, he understands this. He slips into the rhythm of the fight. He is stronger than them, he will show them all. Then they will listen. Then he cannot be silenced. Even if he does not remember how to speak. He must make them understand. The one who feels like chains surprises him. He did not expect her to sneak up. He flexes, tears himself free. He shakes his head, trying to clear it. She has done something. His ears are ringing. He is beginning to remember. 

 

No! His eyes spin, faster, faster. He launches himself across the torn field, at the one he once called brother. At the last second, he shifts, changes the angle of his approach. The wood punches through a good third of his gut. Yes. That will be enough. The red starts to bleed out of his eyes. One last thing. He takes all the things he did not how to say, puts them in a genjutsu. He knows his brother will understand. He closes his eyes. _Izuna?_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -TW: madara is dfab but generally uses he/him pronoun to refer to himself. in other people's perspectives they refer to madara with she/her pronouns. at one point madara uses genjutsu on himself to convince himself to have PIV sex (not written) and have a child.  
> -im so sorry god this turned out wayyy angstier than i thought. pls go read some fluffy blackkat™ tobimada. i was so tempted to give them a happy ending fuck. i mean its every romcom ever JUST TALK TO EACH OTHER. but realistically. madara has too many issues to do that.   
> -but just to be clear this isnt a "madara is trans so heres his tale of Angst and Woe" story. i wrote this to explore his character, to see if i could plausibly write a trans character in a semi-feudal fantasy japan setting, to try to explain how he could have the same neuroses he did in canon and still be a complex person. idk... the uchiha in general are a billion kinds of fucked up but i still love them. tldr; he made bad decisions as a cis, he makes bad decisions as a trans, he's still everyone's favorite punk emo reject.   
> -kojirou's name is a reference to sasaki kojirou from nasuverse, how he is a fake character not meant to exist, dragged into existence by a woman betrayed by the gods and by those she loved, whose ideals revolved around bending reality. medea and madara even have similar names.


End file.
